Funeral For A Friend?
by Thena and Blue
Summary: Sara's funeral and what happens afterwards. No spoilers, this is just our imaginations! As always, Sara fans and GSR fans, beware. OOC


Thena: We know it has been a while since our last fic and then we depress you with this. We realise it may be in bad taste, but to be fair, we've both seen much much worse. Not mentioning any names...

Blue: Really? Anyway, they should be used to our writing style by now and seeing as no one's killed us yet...(looks around for pitchfork wielding Sidle fans) it seems _somebody_ likes it.

Thena: Anyway, we have no idea what really happens to Sara, so this doesn't count as spoilers. Although, if it does pan out the way we've written it, I will give money to the writers. As much money as they want.

Blue: I dunno, I'd give them more money if the 'cockroach wedding' became an actual episode...

Thena: We can but dream... Believe it or not, this story has a character death in it. A shiny button for whoever can guess who dies.

Blue:Can I have a shiny button?

Disclaimer: Not ours, never will be

Funeral For A Friend?

The day opened to a beautiful blue sky. Unfortunately, a funeral was not the best of situations for a summer's day.

Sara Sidle had suffered through numerous bug lectures, sleeping with Grissom and being shot at, but finally she had fallen. Her defeat was not talked about often. Sara had been armed and well trained but a twelve year old psychopath had somehow managed to trap her under a car and cause great embarrassment to the whole team. How this had been achieved, nobody really knew...or really cared.

As a show of unity and strength, all of the CSI's had attended her funeral. It was a lonely affair, with only a dozen people showing up to make sure she was actually dead.

The CSI's stood off to one side, trying to keep their emotional pain within the group.

"God, how long is this vicar gonna go on for?" Nick whined.

"I think he called her 'Sue' just a minute ago," Warrick added. "Surely a vicar is supposed to know her name?"

Catherine shot a withering look at a sobbing Grissom and moved away from him. "I've got some vodka in a hip flask if anyone wants some?"

"On the bright side, we've got the day off." Greg said, before reaching for the alcohol.

At this point, Grissom was on the floor, crawling towards his lover's burial site and trying to get inside the coffin.

"This is just embarrassing." Brass muttered.

Sophia was currently edging towards Grissom and eyeing him with a predatory look. Nick was overcome with disgust; not at the fact that she was trying to seduce him at his girlfriend's funeral, but at the fact that anyone would want to eye up Grissom at any time.

"Do you think we can leave yet?" Warrick asked quietly.

His question obviously wasn't quiet enough because the vicar stopped mid-speech and glared at him.

"Brass, you're a cop!" Greg cried.

"Uh, yeah."

"Surely the whole point of a police officer is to cause mayhem and accuse people of crimes they didn't commit? Accuse someone of murder and let us get out of here!"

"I don't think the Sherriff would like that."

"And I don't think the Sherriff would like his top CSI's dying of boredom!"

"Good point."

With this, Jim Brass, a twenty year veteran of the LVPD pulled out his gun and aimed it at the elderly vicar whose voice trailed off.

"Where were you last Thursday?!"

"Wh...What?"

"You heard me!"

His next move was probably inspired by the high quality of Catherine's vodka. He shot the headstone next to Sara's and then attempted to run at the vicar. His staggering movements went unnoticed as the rest of the mourners fled.

During this commotion, the rest of the team had managed to slink away. Grissom had had to be prised from Sara's coffin with threats of bodily harm to his beloved cockroaches and sheer brute force. Sophia continued to eye him with the expectation that Sara's position would need to be filled and Nick decided that ignoring her would be best for his sanity.

It seemed to be an unspoken agreement that they ended up back at the lab and commandeered Grissom's office. Grissom was dumped in the corner where he proceeded to sob and hug Sara's wreath which he'd swiped off the coffin.

They left him there and proceeded to form an organised thieving party. Everyone knew that each of the supervisors (excluding Grissom) could only deal with the day by storing and drinking vast quantities of alcohol, much of it 'liberated' from prisoners and Mexico.

Within ten minutes, a substantial stockpile of booze had built up and the real 'mourning' could begin.

"Thank God that's over with." Catherine said, removing her five inch heels that she seemed to wear permanently.

"Why did you even go?" Sophia asked. "You hated Sara."

"Look who's talking." Catherine retorted, opening a vodka bottle with only her teeth. "I only went because black looks amazing on me."

"I didn't hate Sara," Sophia argued. "She...annoyed me because she was trying to steal my man."

"This is a disgusting conversation." Greg stated. "Grissom should never be mentioned by women unless it's to say, 'Grissom is so weird. He stole the cockroaches in my house.' Can we get drunk now?"

"I don't know what you're doing Greg, but I am definitely drunk already." Nick said, happily perched in Grissom's chair.

"Hey, get out of there!" Catherine snapped, "If Grissom's had a nervous breakdown then that's my chair! Especially if it spins!"

Nick attempted to spin it and instead fell over the back of it, giggling drunkenly.

Warrick was trying to look cool by leaning against the doorframe but this failed miserably when he mis-judged the distance and fell out of the room.

"I can't believe she's gone!" Grissom wailed.

Catherine sighed and rolled her eyes. "Look, Grissom, I didn't want to tell you before because it was unfair, but now I don't care. Sara was cheating on you."

"What? Who with?"

"Ecklie."

"What!?"

Grissom stood up and charged out of the room, still clutching the wreath.

Greg looked at his drink. "I have so lost my appetite for this. Was that true?"

Catherine shrugged and claimed 'her' chair, kicking Nick out of the way. "I don't know. I hope not, because the very thought makes me nauseous."

"Why did you tell him, then?"

"I was hoping Grissom would kill Ecklie. Then, I don't have to pretend to be attracted to either one of them and I get to be boss of the whole place."

"Wow." Nick said with new respect. "That is really sneaky."

"Why wasn't I invited to this?" Doc Robbins bellowed from the doorframe, ignoring Warrick's cry of pain as his walking stick impaled his left kidney.

"Sorry, Doc, we didn't think."

"You didn't think?! I was stuck at Sara's wake! On my own!"

"Ouch. That's harsh." Greg said, with no sympathy at all. "Why did you go?"

"It said on the invitation 'free refreshments' and I get there and all that's there are some mouldy jam tarts! And you're here getting drunk on stolen alcohol."

"No, no. It's not stolen. It's liberated." Nick clarified.

"We'll return it later!" Warrick said from the ground, "Um, mostly all over the floor..."

"Day shift can clear up" Catherine announced, having already produced knick-knacks for her desk from somewhere and arranged them in place of the jars of questionable substances Grissom had kept there.

Greg had taken them and had last been seen running after Hodges and throwing them at him in drunken glee.

Grissom staggered back into the room, covered with a sticky red substance. At the sight of this, Catherine immediately promised everyone pay raises.

"Did you kill Ecklie?" Robbins asked.

"What? No, of course not."

Catherine stopped making promises and looked disappointed. "Why is there blood on your hands?"

"It's not blood. I couldn't find Ecklie but he was having his office painted red so I wrote rude messages on the walls from a spare tub of paint."

"Wait, you painted rude messages in red paint onto a red wall?"

"Yes. Oh, wait...Was that a waste of time?"

"Definitely." Warrick said bluntly. "At least you got rid of that wreath."

"I lost the wreath? Where is it? Forgive me Sara!"

Catherine put down the bottle of sangria she had been necking and stared thoughtfully at her team. "Maybe things were better when Sara was alive."

"Do you really mean that?" Nick asked.  
She giggled. "No, I'm just incredibly wasted!"

Brass joined their party, covered in grass and dirt. "Thank God I found you! I got lost and couldn't remember where the office was."

"So you looked for it in a forest?" Sophia asked doubtfully.

"No, that was from chasing the vicar. He tried to hide up a tree."

"Oh, did you get him?" Nick asked.

"No, he fell out of it before I could reach him" Brass shrugged, "Then I realised you'd gone and came to find you."

"Do you think he's alright?" Warrick mused.

"He landed on another funeral, so maybe" Brass did not seem overly bothered and cracked open a bottle. "Do you think we should toast Sara?"

"Do we have to?" Catherine asked from where she was simultaneously managing to file her nails and drink the sangria without dropping it. No one was quite sure how.

Greg, who had returned by this point, (Hodges was sat in the hall covered in slime and bits of decomposing bugs, crying for Ecklie.) nodded. "We wouldn't have been able to get drunk and I couldn't have thrown dead stuff Hodges if she hadn't died."

"Fine, whatever. As long as we don't have to stop getting wasted" Catherine conceded. "To Sara"

"To Sara" everyone echoed in a bored manner.

At that point Grissom let out a cry of delight, "I found Sara's wreath! Someone jammed it in the mass spectrometer!"

At that, everyone decided that they needed more alcohol.

It was 0612 the next morning when someone else entered the room. The long suffering cleaner could barely breathe through the overwhelming smell of alcohol but managed to force her way inside. It was the premier CSI team.

Captain Brass was curled into a small ball on the floor and was defensively protecting an empty bottle of vodka. Grissom was clutching hold of a mangy wreath and muttering in his sleep, his ankle clasped tightly by Sophia, who seemed reluctant to let him go, even in unconsciousness.

Catherine and Warrick were sharing the supervisor's chair and appeared much too close for comfort, limbs intertwined and red lipstick spread across both sets of clothes. Nick and Greg were nowhere to be seen, although the cleaner suspected she would find a great deal of booby traps set for the other lab techs.

Sighing, the cleaner closed the door and left the team to their hangovers and their grief. Obviously Sara's death had been a lot harder on them than anyone had suspected.


End file.
